Barone: Designers Of Obamacare Misjudged Behavior Of Uninsured

The designers of Obamacare made wholly inaccurate assumptions about how uninsured and lower income people would respond to new healthcare options, and evidence from the troubled program's start-up should provide a lesson on the pitfalls of governing a socially and economically diverse nation, says Michael Barone.

"The evidence is not all in. But it seems that Americans are not behaving as Obamacare's architects — and many critics — expected," the syndicated columnist writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Barone, the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, highlights three misguided assumptions at the heart of the president's signature healthcare law.

For a start, he says, the authors of the legislation incorrectly assumed that everyone wants health insurance, and that if low-cost coverage was available for those with modest incomes, the uninsured would overwhelmingly take advantage of it.

The evidence so far, Barone says, does not bear that out. He cites low enrollment rates among the uninsured and a recent Kaiser poll indicating the program's unpopularity among that group.

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